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From: "Glen Fuller" <gfuller1@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:33:32 +1100
Yesterday, in the student union where I work, I bumped into an
acquaintance
of mine, a professor of sociology. When it came up that I was teaching the
_Archaeology_, she replied, "I didn't know anyone assigned that book
anymore."
She had a point, there is probably good reason not to assign the
_Archaeology_. Its concepts--the discursive formation, esp--seem dated. If
you want a text whose concepts you can immediately plug in to your own
work,
the _Archaeology_ is not for you.
When writing my dissertation I had a similar reaction from a senior academic
when I started to use some of the methodological conceptualisations from AK
and Discourse on Language for my historical work looking at discursive
formations belonging to subcultural scenes as captured in an archive of
enthusiast magazines. The comment I got was more like, 'Discourse was being
used in the 1980s, why do you want to use it?' I read AK with a
constellation of texts including Theatricum Philosophicum, an interview, and
bits and pieces of others. I tried to abstract the general coordinates of
what Foucault called 'eventalization' from his method. The primary goal was
to move beyond an episodic historicity to capture a sense of the emergence
of particular configurations of power relations over a 34 year period. It
was painstaking work! Basically I was using Foucault's work in a radically
different thematic context, but in a way that I hope is congruent with his
method.
Ciao,
Glen.